Physicist

MOSCOW -- The Russian Supreme Court ordered a physicist Wednesday to stand trial again on espionage charges, overturning a jury's acquittal that had been celebrated as a triumph of Russia's post-Soviet legal reform. Human-rights groups and legal experts said the highest court's intervention in Valentin Danilov's case demonstrates the monumental task ahead to fully reform a judicial branch still permeated by political pressure and corruption more than a decade after the Soviet collapse.

Alex Fong, 49, is a physicist and president of the Florida Photonics Cluster, an industry advocacy group in Orlando. He is an executive with the Orlando unit of Gooch and Housego PLC, a company based in Great Britain. Fong received an MBA degree from the University of Florida and is advising UCF on its proposed sensor research center in Osceola County. He spoke with Sentinel reporter Richard Burnett . CFB: What is the science of photonics and how does it connect with our daily lives?

LOS ANGELES -- A physicist accused of exporting potential nuclear triggers to Israel pleaded guilty to two federal counts as part of a deal with prosecutors. Richard Kelly Smyth, a fugitive for 16 years until his July arrest in Spain, entered the plea Friday after prosecutors said they would drop the 28 other counts against him. Smyth, 72, was first charged in 1985 with exporting devices known as krytrons to Heli Corp. in Israel. He faces up to seven years in prison and a $110,000 fine.

Central Floridians are no strangers to violent thunderstorms, living in the lightning capital of the country. But now scientists have discovered an exotic and dynamic form of energy lurking in the thunderclouds above: dark lightning. Scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology on the Space Coast are traveling the world explaining the mysterious bursts of energy in the atmosphere during lightning storms that emit little visible light. According to scientist Joseph Dwyer and his colleagues, space telescopes - looking for high-energy bursts from solar flares, black holes and exploding stars - detected strange, bright bursts but had no idea where they originated.

BOSTON - A Chicago physicist who provoked controversy earlier this year by announcing plans to clone humans says the first person he will try to copy is himself. Richard Seed said his wife, Gloria, has agreed to carry an embryo created by combining the nucleus of one of his cells with a donor egg, The Boston Globe reported Sunday. Seed declined to give his wife's age, but described her as ``post-menopausal.''

The United States' first satellite, Explorer 1, soared into space 35 years ago Sunday. Almost 1,000 successful U.S. space launches followed Explorer's launch on Jan. 31, 1958, atop a Jupiter-C rocket. For University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen, the success of Explorer 1 was ''exhilarating.'' Van Allen's geiger counter on the satellite led to his most notable discovery: bands of intense radiation surrounding Earth, much like huge doughnuts. Explorer 1 transmitted data until 1958 and plunged through the atmosphere in 1970.

A Japanese physicist who says he may have performed a successful cold fusion experiment described his findings to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he found some believers. Osaka University scientist Akito Takahashi's work has triggered debate in Japan since he reported recently that the experiment produced 70 percent more power, in the form of heat, than it expended in electricity. Scientists in the United States have been skeptical of cold fusion claims since being unable to duplicate the results of a 1989 Utah experiment in which two researchers claimed to produce fusion energy at room temperature.

LONDON -- Britain's most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, on Tuesday condemned the Iraq war as a "war crime" and said the U.S.-led invasion was based on lies. The physicist spoke during an event in Trafalgar Square at which protesters read the names of thousands of Iraqis and coalition troops killed since the March 2003 invasion. "The war was based on two lies," said Hawking. "The first was we were in danger of weapons of mass destruction, and the second was that Iraq was somehow to blame for Sept.

BALTIMORE -- If Richard Conn Henry, a Johns Hopkins University physicist and astronomer, has his way -- and he concedes he almost certainly won't -- the coming year will be the last with 365 days. He has devised a better calendar, he thinks, than the one that has sufficed for more than four centuries -- the one that graces office desks and hangs on walls everywhere (including in Henry's kitchen). The alternative may sound drastic, if not far-fetched: Some months would lose a day. Others would gain one. Leap years would be abolished in favor of a week-long "mini-month" tucked between June and July every five or six years.

Hans Bethe, the nuclear physicist whose elegant calculations explained how stars shine and laid the foundation for development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs, has died. He was 98. Bethe, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at his home in Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University announced Monday. A prolific Jewish scientist who often was proclaimed "one of Nazi Germany's greatest gifts to the United States," Bethe was a reluctant but crucial participant in the wartime effort to develop nuclear weapons.

When Lynn Bernard Poché Jr. went to car rallies, he usually carried his camera. In the 1970s, he loved to create short, funny films starring Orlando Sports Car Club members — he would write a story line, direct the shooting and edit the movie together. So when the Orlando resident heard from a matchmaking friend about a woman he should meet — and learned they had been at the same event months ago — he checked tapes of friends he videotaped. Lo and behold, there she was. By chance, he had caught his date on tape.

Sir Isaac Newton (Justin Salinger) tosses the curls of his 18th-century wig and draws himself erect: "May I ask what is going on here?" Good question. A second nurse lies dead at a Swiss clinic and the culprit Albert Einstein (Paul Bhattacharjee) cannot be arrested as he's elsewhere playing Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata. Despite hi-def performances underlining the theatricality of this Cold War scientific warning, even Josie Rourke's smart, valiant revival of Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1961 "The Physicists" can't quite heal the rift between the drama and the dialectic.

Listen up, fans of Star Trek and Dark Shadows: The father of parallel universes is finally getting his due on television. You'll find the tribute to quantum physicist Hugh Everett III in Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. PBS' Nova presents this touching, imaginative program at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Don't let the idea of quantum physics keep you away. Writer-producer-director Louise Lockwood uses animation, rock music and a dramatic personal story to make the subject understandable. Mark Oliver Everett -- lead singer E in the band Eels -- supplies the music and the personal story.

Thank you for finding the room on Page A1 of Sunday's Sentinel to start Kevin Spears' enlightening article on the Large Hadron Collider and the role of Marc Baarmand of the Florida Institute of Technology in its development. Spears' word pictures were stunning and memorable: "thrilling scientists with the prospect of sledgehammering some of the tiniest-known elements . . .," "scientists will crack open protons . . . billions of times smaller than the period that ends this sentence," "dark matter . . . invisible stuff that exists not just among distant galaxies but in the 12 inches or so between your eyeballs and this newspaper."

Could there be a more powerful symbol of the limitless possibilities of space exploration than to see scientist Stephen Hawking escape his wheelchair for four minutes of weightlessness? Mr. Hawking, a world-famous astrophysicist who has studied black holes and other space phenomena, is stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease and has been wheelchair bound for decades. Thursday he experienced simulated weightlessness aboard a modified Boeing 727 jet. Yes, it was a bid for publicity for the company sponsoring the flight, but that doesn't detract from the wonder of seeing Mr. Hawking spinning in flight, performing moves usually reserved for the most skilled Earth-bound gymnast.

A nuclear physicist opposed to President Reagan's space-based defense system is hoping to shake up history by proving that on a dozen occasions since 1945 three presidents prepared secret plans to bomb communist countries. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy never launched a full-fledged nuclear attack because they feared that as many as 50 million Americans would be killed in retaliatory bombings, said Michio Kaku, professor of nuclear physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

'Atrumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised,'' we are told in the Bible, and for centuries believers have taken this prophecy literally. Yet until now, belief in the world to come has been exclusively a matter of religious faith, unsupported by the tenets of modern science.So it's no wonder that physicist Frank J. Tipler has created a stir with his recent book, The Physics of Immortality, which purports to demonstrate to a mathematical certainty that the ancient promise of the soul's redemption shall indeed come to pass.